Yeo: another scalp for Guido Fawkes

Probably, if this were a World War II fighter base, the shooting down in flames of Tim Yeo MP would count as a shared kill. After all, we've each of us had a good burst at him – Christopher Booker, Richard North, David Rose, Bishop Hill and – the coup de grace! – the Sunday Times team responsible for that sting at the weekend.

Even so, I think the man who deserves most credit for this kill is Guido Fawkes. There's an implacable ruthlessness about Guido which I would find quite terrifying if he weren't on the same side of the argument as me. On our fighter base he wouldn't be with the rest of us down the pub of an evening singing songs round the piano. He'd be out in the hangar with his rigger and his fitter discussing ways to tune his Spitfire to an even deadlier pitch; or maybe boning up obsessively on his aircraft recognition. He's a loner; a cold-dead-eyed killer; and he really, REALLY hates the enemy – to a degree I don't think I'd personally be capable of, though I'm glad he does for they deserve it.

Who does Guido hate? Pretty much the entire political class, for a start. (His other notable scalps include, of course, Chris Huhne, Denis McShane and Mike Hancock). Gosh, wouldn't it be nice to think he was wrong – that this was just the childish spite of a professional provocateur? But he's not. We look back aghast at the corruption of the 18th century with its rotten boroughs, but will future generations judge our own era of malfeasance, incompetence, special favours and vested interests any more kindly?

For me, quite the biggest scandal of our era is the one involving energy policy and the great climate change scam. The damage it has done to our economy is incalculable. It has resulted in honest men from Johnny Ball and David Bellamy to Nigel Lawson and Peter Lilley being vilified and marginalised, while dishonest men (whether grant-troughing scientists or cynical, greedy politicians or rent-seeking businesses) have been rewarded. It has damaged our landscape, corrupted public debate, ruined people's lives. It has enriched the few at the expense of the many.

None of this would have been possible without the complicity of politicians like Tim Yeo, Greg Barker, Chris Huhne, Peter Hain, Ed Davey, Luciana Berger, Alex Salmond, Lord Deben, Lord Marland, Greg Clark, and all the other assiduous promoters of the great "man-made-global-warming" myth. Each of them, Conservative, LibDem, Labour, SNP alike, has failed what I would consider to be the most basic test by which we should judge our politicians: have their policies made things better or worse for the electorate they supposedly serve?

In the case of almost every measure that has been introduced by parliament in the last twenty years or so – from the Climate Change Act to our current policies on wind farms, biomass and renewables generally – has been an abject disaster for the British people.

Yet had these politicians done their due diligence – had they done as much background reading as, say, Christopher Booker has done; or had they paid more attention to all the stuff coming out of the Global Warming Policy Foundation – they could have nipped this nonsense in the bud. It's not, after all, as though it's a new theory, the idea that the whole climate change thing has been overdone. The truth has been out there, thanks to sites like Climate Audit and Watts Up With That?, for well over a decade.

So why didn't they do their due diligence? Because it suited them not to, that's why. For some it was a convenient excuse to justify more tax, more regulation, more quangos; for some it was a way of courting approval by being seen to take seriously an issue of apparent public concern; for the worst of the lot, though, it was also an excuse to line their pockets and feather their nests.

Tim Yeo, as we know, has been making £200,000 a year on top of his basic parliamentary salary from his various green business interests. What does it say about our political system that he was simultaneously permitted to act as chairman of the parliamentary committee charged with scrutinising the government department – DECC – primarily responsible for deciding green policy? And what does it say about the state of our media that this scandal was not exposed years ago?

Let's just take one example – the many thousands of pounds Yeo receives for his "work" advising on the environment and safety committee of Eurotunnel plc. Trains: doesn't sound like there could be much conflict of interest there. But wait – as Christopher Booker has noticed Yeo's involvement here concerns a very specific issue: the Euros 250 million interconnector – carried through the tunnel – which will enable French-made nuclear electricity to provide Britain with reliable energy whenever there are shortages.

And why might there be shortages in need of conventional power back up? Because the more the National Grid is exposed to the intermittent, unreliable energy from our expanding renewable energy sector (solar, onshore, and – worse – offshore wind), the more desperately we'll need the baseload capacity provided by more conventional power.

But this is a problem almost entirely of our political class's making. If politicians like Yeo hadn't so determinedly pushed for renewables and if they hadn't fought so hard to resist speedy exploitation of our vast shale gas reserves, then there would simply be no need for this imported energy. The whole thing is a massive scam in which the political class has created an entirely false economic sector, largely dependent on public subsidy, and reliant for its existence on irresponsible, dishonest government energy regulation which would never have been passed in a million years had it been subjected to appropriate scrutiny by the people supposedly charged with scrutinising such matters. The chairman of the Energy and Climate Change select committee, say.

Anyone who thinks Tim Yeo deserves a shred of sympathy should watch his blustering show of outrage on Newsnight in 2010 when Guido Fawkes had the temerity to suggest that he might be using public office for his personal benefit. Truly, the Trougher has no shame!

With people like this in office, is it any wonder that Guido Fawkes's motto is "We get 'em because we really hate 'em"?